Andrew Vachss: The Weight

There’s also people who get off on being a rat. Nothing in it for them; they like doing that kind of stuff.

So it’s just as hard for people on my side of the law to sniff them out as it is for the law to sniff out a guy who does freakish stuff.

There’s even people stupid enough to rat on themselves. A pro can be smart about work and dumb about other things. Say you talk about your work to your girlfriend: all it takes is for her to get mad at you one time to put a whole crew under the jail.

A few years ago, that happened to a guy I’d worked some jobs with. He was real good-looking. Smooth talker, too. Always found some girl to pick up his tabs-I don’t think he ever paid rent in his life. This guy, he’d never talk about our kind of work, but any woman he ever stayed with, she’d have to know he wasn’t any W-2 man. Probably helped them get over the nights he didn’t come home. And explained the flashy way he always dressed, too. Whatever, they were always happy to help out with some cash while he was waiting on this big score he had coming.

Only this last one, she couldn’t leave it that way. She just had to satisfy herself he wasn’t spending her money on some other girl.

A lot of them do it now. They call it “playing detective.” You know what I mean: they buy their boyfriend a cell phone and pay the bill themselves. The mark thinks he’s playing her, but the person who pays the bill gets the bill. Which means she gets a lot of phone numbers.

So, anyway, the girlfriend, she finds a number she doesn’t recognize, dials it while the guy’s sleeping. Wakes him up and goes off on him. She’s taking care of him, and he fucking cheats on her!?

He should’ve just promised her he was done with that other girl. Better yet, just walked away and not come back.

But, no, he has to be a big man. Throws a fistful of hundreds on the floor, tells her, “Here, bitch. Go pay your little cell-phone bill.”

All their time together, she thought he was her kept boy, so seeing all that money sends her over the edge. A few minutes earlier, she was screaming at him to get out. Now she’s standing in front of the door. She’s got more to say, and he’s going to listen to it or…

He should have let her scream herself dry. But, the kind of fool he is, he’s got to play his role, just like he did flashing the money. Ends up banging her around pretty hard.

He’s not even a few blocks away when she goes 911 on him. They pick him up right on the street. Once they tell him what he’s being pinched for, he doesn’t say a word.

This guy figures, they arraign him in the morning, he takes whatever they’re offering. What’s he looking at… thirty days and some anger-management class?

But he’s only in a few hours when the girlfriend waltzes in and tells the cops she’s decided not to press charges. Stupid broad, she thought it was her case. When they tell her it’s not up to her, she loses it again. By the time she’s done running her mouth, they’ve got enough probable cause to take her home and have a look around. That was all it took.

I’ll say this for that guy: maybe he played big-shot, but he paid for doing it, and he didn’t ask anyone he ever worked with to split the tab.

When a whole crew gets pulled in at the same time, the first thing they do is cut you off from the other guys. There’s all kinds of ways to do that.

But these cops hadn’t even mentioned the job, much less any of my partners on it.

When they left me alone in the interrogation room-a lot of them try that-I had plenty of time to think.

So, when they finally came back in, I thought I’d try that same trick myself, dividing them up.

“Those other guys, they watch too much TV,” I said to the older cop.

“Is that right?”

“They found my DNA ?” I said, making a joke of it. I knew these cops must have been watching while the sex-crimes buffoons took the first crack at me.

The older guy’s partner-a black guy, closer to my age; clean-cut, sharp dresser-said, “DNA doesn’t lie,” making his voice all deep and serious, the way the sex-crimes clown had said it to me.

“And I still didn’t start yelling for Legal Aid,” I reminded them.

“Meaning…?”

“I figured-I hoped anyway-they’d send in the A-Team sooner or later.”

“You wouldn’t be stroking us now, would you, Sugar?” the older cop said.

“I’m just saying, there’s cops and there’s cops. I mean, come on, if they really had any of that CSI stuff, they would have shown it to me by now. Waved it in my face.”

“You think that’s what we’d do?”

“No, I mean those other guys. Like I said, TV cops. But I know you couldn’t have anything-”

“You were gloved?” the black guy cut me off, like he just saw an opening and needed to move fast before it closed.

It was my turn to look disappointed. “That’s cold, Officer,” I said to him. “I thought we were going to play this straight.”

“Cheap shot,” the older guy said. A cop’s apology, sure, but I trusted it at least enough to see if I could get them to say the wrong thing.

So I baited the trap: “Something’s screwy here. Listen, I absolutely know you don’t have any of that stuff. You know why? Because I know it wasn’t me who did it.”

“Simple as that?”

“It’s the truth,” I said, dropping an even bigger hint. What I had in mind, it had to be their idea. It couldn’t come from me, or they wouldn’t trust it.

“Let’s say, just for the sake of argument, let’s say you’re right,” the older guy said. “Say we don’t have one single piece of physical evidence to tie you to the rape. That’d make it a tougher case in court, sure. But we’re still holding the ace.”

“I got picked out of a photo spread?”

“Got it in one,” he said. Smiled a little, too.

“I don’t know what to say about that,” I said, real quick-before they realized they’d told me something I didn’t know. I’d already been in a lineup, but I’d just been guessing about the mug-shot book.

So I kept going: “I mean, I’ve been in lineups where I was the only white guy on the stage, but this one was fair. Hell, a couple of those guys looked enough like me to be my twin brother.”

The black cop laughed. Not the first time he’d heard that one, I guessed. “Probably so,” he said. “Only thing is-”

“Yeah, I know. They were cops, right? And no cop ever did a rape.”

They looked at each other for a second-just a quick glance. I was walking pretty close to the edge of their line with that last one. They must have had some way of signaling each other. Or maybe they’d worked together so long they didn’t need to.

“But you didn’t ask for your phone call,” the black cop said. “Which means you think you’ve got a shot at getting us to buy your story.”

Yeah, I was right-he was smart, just like his partner. Maybe I would get that shot. “It’s no story,” I said, making sure I didn’t sound resentful.

“You know what would turn it for you, Caine?” the older one said. “An alibi. That would pretty much trump our ace.”

I’d been hoping for something else, but I rolled with the punch, and tried again. “For you, or for a jury?”

“For you ,” he hit back. “You know there’s no point giving us a piece of cellophane-that’d just make it worse. But you give us a real alibi, we’ll check it out. Check it out deep. Turn it upside down and sideways. If there’s a hole in it, we’ll find it; trust me on that. But if you’re telling the truth-and, like I said, I kind of think you just might be-that’d be good for you.”